For All The Hysteria on Gun Tracing, Little Evidence It Solves Anything

Unserialized firearms need to be banned, we’re told, because the lack of a serial number makes it impossible for the police to trace a gun. Gun tracing is supposedly a vital part of a police officer’s investigative arsenal and so-called ghost guns make that tool impossible to use.

Now, I’m unmoved by this argument, in part because if we’re going to violate parts of the Bill of Rights because it’s easier for the police, then that pesky Fourth Amendment is going to have a rough time of things. We don’t accept that, so I’m not going to accept an infringement on my right to keep and bear arms.

Yet there’s also the fact that it’s pretty clear how gun tracing has been overhyped as an investigative tool. In fact, Dean Weingarten notes just how overhyped it is.

USA Today published a hit piece on “ghost guns” Dec. 12, attempting to use the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson as a reason to impose unconstitutional restrictions on homemade firearms.

It appears Brian Thompson was assassinated with a homemade firearm. However, the manufacture of the firearm did not interfere with the investigation of his murder. The suspect was arrested without any assistance from gun-tracing data, as is the case with virtually all violent crimes. Gun tracing has no measurable effect on solving violent crimes. It is difficult to find any violent crime that was solved with gun-trace data. The USA Today article misleads from the first paragraph:

For decades, America’s detectives have made breakthroughs in crime using gun traces. A homicide investigator typically uses ballistics and serial numbers of weapons checked via a vast network of gun shop records, manufacturer IDs and crime databases.

The unstated conflation is from crimes of possession or illegal gun sales to homicide. Homicides that are solved by the use of trace data seem to be nonexistent. It may have happened, but this correspondent has not found documented examples. If there were examples, they would be shouted out by the ATF and those who want a disarmed population. They are not. The USA Today article does not cite a single violent crime solved by using trace data.

Now that’s genuinely fascinating.

We’ve kept paperwork for firearms since 1968. If that’s when gun tracing started, and we can’t find a single documented case in nearly 60 years, we have a problem.

And it’s not just our own system that doesn’t seem to be able to present proof that gun tracing works.

Canada has required all handguns to be registered since 1934. The Canadian handgun registration is far more intrusive than the U.S. trace system. In 1995, when the Canadian handgun registry had been in use for over 60 years, the Canadian Department of Justice could not identify a single instance where handgun registration helped to solve a crime. From publicsafety.gc.ca:

Department of Justice officials admitted that they could not identify a single instance where handgun registration helped solved a crime (Hansard, 1995, p. 12,259)

Of course, that data is nearly 30 years old now, so it’s hypothetically possible things have changed since then. Yet the overall point is still pretty sound. The truth is that for all the hysteria about being able to trace guns, no evidence is being presented that it’s resulted in a single homicide arrest.

Granted, there’s no way that gun trace data is enough in and of itself to get a conviction, and no one is saying otherwise, but we’re not even really seeing where it was key evidence in a successful prosecution for a murder charge. 

Now, if this tool for law enforcement hasn’t done anything to speak of for all the decades before the rise of the so-called ghost gun, then what danger do unserialized firearms represent in the first place?

For all the hysteria, even accepting that these are somehow about to become ubiquitous in criminal circles, it seems unlikely that banning them would do much of anything. Especially as criminals have never really seemed to have much trouble getting guns in the first place.

If the usual suspects want to argue otherwise, they need to start bringing receipts.